Viewed from my sick bed — how apt! — Tom Six’s The Human Centipede was a perfectly good horror tale of power. Two American women and a Japanese tourist find themselves in the clutches of a mad scientist, Teutonic Doctor Heiter (creepy Dieter Laser), in his modern house deep in a German forest, so it may have been some sort of Nazi allegory a la Salo: 120 Days of Sodom by Pasolini, and not unlike my time in the SWP.
The attractive young victims find themselves sewn together — mouth to anus — to make one long organism that has to do tricks for its owner. How I laughed when the Doc tried to make it fetch a newspaper! Had he got his pet selling it I’d have been transported to Saturday lunchtime paper sales. Now those were a shudderfest.
Some have dismissed the movie as shit, but it’s beautifully-shot shit and strangely moving, not to mention darkly funny in parts. There’s only one visceral scary moment that made me squirm and nothing that made me jump. It was more one long queasy realisation that something ain’t right, not unlike my time in … but now I repeat myself.
I thought it unfair that the guy was at the head, a placement I shall fondly think of as District Organiser — definitely pole position under the circumstances. You really didn’t wan’t to be any further down the food chain, spluttering out someone else’s used food like edicts freshly squeezed out by the CC that morning.
Is it nasty? Of course it’s nasty. Just like … oh there I go again.
Anna’s food blog here:
http://annacheneats.blogspot.com/